Blogging The Everything Store: Amazon is Santa Claus

On the Web, the grind and chaos of retail’s biggest day will be invisible—hidden hundreds of miles away, inside the massive warehouses of juggernauts like Amazon.com and Wal-Mart.

Read More

How I Found Jeff Bezos’s Biological Father

Children with fractured or nonexistent relationships with one or both of their birth parents are more likely to end up with psychological or behavioral problems—not leading powerful nations, companies, or cultural movements. But in the case of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs — and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — the unusual circumstances of their birth seemingly helped to create an overpowering drive to succeed and to challenge the status quo.

Read More

Grading the Kindle Fire as Amazon’s Tablet Turns Two

Two years ago, Bezos introduced the original Kindle Fire at one of those stereotypical press confabs in New York City. That first device was in many respects a dud. Now Amazon is taking on Google and Apple in the tablet market.

Read More

Amazon Unveils New Kindle Readers

For the last six years, Amazon has constructed a nearly unbreakable hold on the digital-reading market, thanks in part to the company’s Kindle e-readers—and its ability to weave together attractive new features that broaden the reading experience.

Read More

Shocker: Jeff Bezos Buys the Washington Post!

The deal is surprising for a number of reasons. Bezos believes that the Internet is changing the entire business landscape, but so far he has seemed devoted to blazing new paths, not rescuing ailing old media franchises.

Read More

Does Jeff Bezos Care About Profits?

The Bezos Doctrine is powerful. New businesses don’t have to be good. They just have to appeal to customers. As long as consumers are consuming and shareholders are buying what Bezos is selling, Amazon looks fairly unbeatable.

Read More

Amazon’s Hit Man

Amazon and New York City book publishers have very different views of the future of the book business.

Read More

The Calculus Behind Amazon Prime

Now six years after the program’s creation, rivals, both online and off, have sensed the increasing threat posed by Prime and are rushing to try to respond.

Read More

Can Amazon Be the Walmart of the Web

A look from 2009 at Amazon’s gathering power in general merchandise categories. Walmart, incidentally, did not like the headline to this article, and initiated a price war that holiday season.

Read More

Amid the Gloom, An E-Commerce War

A story from the heat of the Great Recession, when eBay’s fortunes were flagging and Amazon’s were starting to rise.

Read More